The Water Remembers Being the Body

The first place it happened was Lake Päijänne in Finland. It was a normal afternoon in mid-June, where a fisherman - Veikko Saarni, 79, near deaf, with hands like fossilised woods - went on his daily flyfishing session; for it’s the prime season for excellent hatches. Nothing out of ordinary happened: he arrived at the spot, pulled out his foldable fishing chair, waited patiently till his stopwatch showed that the waves ebbed every 20 seconds, and casted his net for the greedily feeding fishes. That day he only caught 5 fishes, which he gave a quick, clean stab, bled them by the gills and threaded them onto a stringer. But as soon as he was ready to get his stuff to leave, he realised the rhythm of the water had changed. It was very subtle at first, which he only caught because he had been focusing on its rhythm in the past few hours with the eyes of a hawk.

But as he watched it more, it became clearer to him that the water was pulsating in a breathing-like movement that animated beings with a heart would do with their chest. He pulled out his stopwatch again and calculated: 12 shallow inhales per minute. Then, he calculated his own inhales – around 15 – which made the result rather ambiguous as to whether the breathing was of human nature. Either way, he conscientiously documented the pulsating rhythm in Morse code per protocol, and took his water-stained paper to the Institute of Agriculture and Climate Change.

The building of the institute was fully-mirrored monolith gunk.

From a distance, it appeared to disappear into the landscape, reflecting clouds, sky and tree lines with a nagging accuracy. Up close, however, the illusion turned into a disgustingly reflective moist substance, stained with fine streaks of algorithmic rain. Some sort of light-absorbing composites that are commonly used in drone camouflage and experimental military labs, except it was wet to the touch.  The building has no signage other than a small stone beside the entrance that read:

‘Observation is participation.

Unauthorised knowledge is disregarded.’

There were no windows, since it was made of a transparent substance; only a revolving door at the centre with water dripping through the seams.

Veikko walked to the entrance.

 “Name and intention,” a security guard suddenly materialised next to it as soon as Veikko got close. He wore an unrealistically smooth grey suit, with a face that seemed to be made of rubber.

“Veikko Saarni. Reporting abnormal water activities.”

A small click on the security monitor.

“Door 3, first floor on the left.”

Veikko walked inside the dripping door, with his eyes closed to prepare for the falling water. Yet, he was completely dry. He looked back and realised that the water was a high-resolution light projection of a looped waterfall video. He shook his head and continued walking inside. The hallway was lit with a pale, untraceable glow – like the sky before a thunderstorm. But the light didn’t feel quite natural even though no visible light installations could be seen on the ceilings or the walls. The design was made of clean, straight, sharp lines – perfectly aligned with the minimalistic mirrored monolith exterior – yet its lack of roundness gave Veikko a horrendous vertigo.

Inside: an overwhelming air-conditioned sterility slapped Veikko’s face as soon as he stepped into the room. He was greeted by a man with a short handshake, who gestured him to sit across his desk.

“Let’s see…Veikko Saarni. Reporting abnormal water activities.”

“Yes. Veikko. Veikko,” Veikko pointed at himself, “I saw the water of lake Päijänne breathing just now.”

The man looked at him with a stern face, the way one might look at an elevator arriving. Then, he started to type on his keyboard, “One moment please…Let’s see…Veikko Saarni…Ok…there we go,” he clicked something on his screen, “delusional tendency reported last year after a stroke incident, claiming a birch tree chatting to him in Estonian…”

“But the tree did say that…”

“Ok…Let’s see…If you would like to report a concern, please email the address of info@insituteclimatechangefinland.com. Someone will respond to you…” the man read word-by-word on his screen.

Veikko sighed, “Just take a look at this, please.” He took out the Morse code from his pocket and handed to the man, leaving the room in defeat. By the time his consciousness caught up with his own body, he realised that he has returned to the lake once again. Around him were various drones flying about the trees and the lake; some measuring water and some oxygen. He stared at them in silence. Then, threw himself into the water. The next morning, Finnish national news showed the raw footage from the forestry drone at the lake Päijänne displaying a perfect respiratory rhythm. The man who Veikko visited yesterday was interviewed; looking dishevelled and in shock.

Within weeks, rivers in Cambodia began trembling at the touch of human feet. The Amazon surged in arrhythmia, stuttering in the rhythm of convulsion. The Nile rearranged its tributaries into a branching pattern indistinguishable from a nervous system. The Chao Phraya in Thailand began twitching at dawn, the surface snapping and recoiling in rhythmic jolts like a calf muscle in sleep. The Saint Lawrence River, just east of Quebec, curled at its edges every hour, as though flexing fingers. And in Santa Fe, the city’s artificial reservoir—a flat, glassy sheet of civic engineering—began to beat; rising and pulsing every four seconds. It emitted a low, cellular thud that resembled heartbeat so uncannily that the local gathered around in utter fear.

In a short span of a month, every family, singleton, couple stopped going outside and became glued to the telly box of the 24/7 news. Especially Finnish news, which had become the supreme source of truth. The news began by focusing on the scientists who were throwing around foreign words like hydrological anomalies, irregular stratification, seismic echoes, and so on and so forth. Of course, nobody cared about science enough to pay any attention. Instead, they turned to social media to wait for a perfectly sensible explanation. There, every day, new doomsday predictions, religious exegesis, sceptical questionings vied for sovereignty. The dominating idea was that the abnormalities of water had become so worldwide that the water itself was no longer a static element, but a sentient, delicate, extremely intelligent nervous network of one mega-organism, with unknown agenda. Soon enough, it was not just the lakes or public reservoirs; it was the private basins, the sinks, the bathtubs of every household. A doctor in Recife placed his hand in a sinkful of still water and withdrew it with tears in his eyes. “I felt my mother’s spine,” he said. “In the water. As I remembered it when I was seven.”

Now it had been brought into the home, the Internet turned into a complete frenzy.

America, Finland and China started to ban all use of social media, and other countries in Europe, America, Asia and Africa followed suit. Meanwhile, the art and culture world took no time in milking the benefits of this poetic catastrophe. A Chilean poet became an instant hit with the new work ‘The Spine of Rivers’, followed by a Belarusian contemporary dancer choregraphed a piece called ‘The Elbow of the Caspian’, but those were ultimately limited to their little cliques. The fear of the public was not really soothed until a retired priest in Naples, who was living with his Parkinson’s riddled father at the time, claimed the Adriatic was the ‘God’s ribcage’.

Now, the matter has become religious.

The Patriarch of Alexandria, who delivered his message in four languages, including one no one could identify. “We do not contain water,” he said, “the water contains us. For the water is the body with a soul, and we are residing in its mercy.” Some said this was the return of divine essence—the Holy Spirit liquefied. Others claimed it was the antichrist, mimicking creation in order to unmake it. The Vatican issued a circular suggesting that if the water remembered being the body, perhaps it was because the body was never truly separate from God—but this was quickly edited after uprisings in southern Italy, where villagers had begun lying naked in roadside ditches, waiting for the rain to shape them.

Still, the blessing from the Vatican had put water as the new supreme leader for all mainstream religions. Though led by Christian popes in the Vatican, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Judaists quickly followed, replacing their own god with a bowl of water. Swimming pools were removed from the public and put into the temples and churches and shrines; whereby every act of bathing and swimming became religious rituals.

Politics saw it as the new weapon for division and culture identity. Nations started to draw borders through lakes they used to share, making the border now an unbreachable gap to the genetics of the people in adjacent countries. Conflict and hate crime skyrocketed between the border people that put countries into endless negotiations, and in worst case – wars. During this stage, Water was still behaving defensively: It shivered or drew back or curled when in contact with humans. Until one day, in India, a crowd of farmers marched into the Godavari with offerings and did not return. The police were quickly alerted and proceeded to send rescue guards and the science team to the river immediately. But they returned empty handed after 3 days of searching, with the chilling conclusion that now, water has become responsive, communicative to our behaviours. In other words, they started to do things to us.

And it was everywhere.

In Canada, a protester was swallowed by a puddle that formed nowhere near any rain. In Mexico, a senator attempted to baptize himself in a national park and emerged speaking a forgotten dialect that no one really understood. Though one linguist in China claimed that it was the poetic dialect from the Qin dynasty. But that claim was soon rebutted by Korea’s department of culture heritage, who insisted that it’s an ancient local dialect from Gwangju. Either way, the senator resigned a week later to start his new ‘Water Evolution’ spirituality clan. Meanwhile, thousands gathered in Rio, stripping to their skin and throwing themselves into the sea. One of them, a non-verbal boy, floated on the surface for thirteen hours without sinking. When pulled ashore, he wrote the words: “my body has remembered its past life as the water. For I am water, and you are water too. We are our bodies, and our bodies are water.”

Soon after, the water became further synched with the ecosystem of human consciousness, with one man in Istanbul controlling the ebbs and flows of the Bosphorus remotely through drawing a line down his arm. When he uploaded the video online, most comments were about it being a deepfake; another wannabe who’s trying to milk the situation to earn his ‘fuck you’ money and avoid capitalistic slavery. A week later, however, CCTV footage of a woman in New York who danced by the Hudson with the water matching her movement was broadcasted by Fox News.

That was THE event that caused a global dystopia with civil unrest in every corner of the street of every country.

The military was quickly deployed by all nations on a highest alert. But that didn’t stop the forming of new sects, who called themselves The Osmosis Clan, The Soluble Order, The Molecules… They started to smash all reflective surfaces and mirrors as they were seen as a blasphemy to water due to their resemblance. Salvation, for them, lay on a re-absorption into the divine liquid, where individuality in our mammal breed is only an evolutionary glitch. For our separation from water - staying alive through oxygen and walking on lands - is a punishment.

These new sects were formed so rapidly that the Vatican felt threatened to its very core. The pope was holding emergency assemblies on a daily basis, with cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns resigning to either join the new sects, become hermits or kill themselves. It seems that God, for them, is supposed to be believed blindly with a heart, not stared at with their own two eyes. Though the Pope himself was less concerned with the belief of God, for he has long announced that his love for God has turned to platonic from a passionate affair between the bodies. But his power was weakening by the day that he was reluctantly making plans to abolish the Vatican for retirement in his farm cottage in Southern France.

At the last week before he put the plan to motion – around four days before – the Tiber decided to stop flowing. It was noticed by an Italian fishmonger first. That day, the Pope was shopping for clothes to prepare for a quiet life on the farm. He was looking forward to it after a life in the spotlight, but when the time came, he found himself doubting everything of his own taste – the colour of his buttons, the type of shirts, the pattern of his socks… his instinct was too institutionalised and trained for attention, that it was very difficult to tell whether going against it is humility or simply bad taste. Then, he started to think what his days will be like on that farm – tending to the crops, feeding the chickens, walking long and far in the wilderness. He felt bored already by the mere thought of it, which also made him realise his old age. Had he been younger, he might have travelled to kill his time with distractions. But now he is too old to be ignorant of the fact that nothing thrilled him more than the intricate drama of the Vatican’s spiritual landscape. All of it gave him an intense trepidation, for it’s easy to say that it was all a performance, but when the mask became hard to take off, it started to say too much about one’s character then one wishes to know.

So when the news travelled to him, the Pope gathered another assembly to discuss the matter in relation to the existence or extinction of the Vatican. The outcome of that was leveraging the new quality of Tiber – stillness – as parallel to the qualities of God: impassive and unmoving. What this then implied was that the Tiber Water, out of all waters, is the supreme one, the new true God in water form; dragging the birthplace and residence of God, hence power, once again back within walls of the Vatican city. This of course got the Italian government interested in its implication on the politics and economy of the country, in addition to religious power. In 3 months, The Italian Ministry of Infrastructure worked with the Vatican to launch a multi-million-euro redevelopment plan. The riverbanks were being converted into a religious complex: TiberVita™—the birthplace of the new water God. In addition to a new water-themed post-contemporary styled church, it also has a shopping mall, a fine arts centre, and the Museum of Aquatic Memory, sponsored by Nestlé. You can buy a ticket. You can buy the water in bottles. You can buy T-shirts printed with rippling lungs, marked Limited Edition. You can even book a wedding at the old baptismal site—now a coffee bar with WiFi and views of the still water or “gaze of God”.

In other parts of the world, the water still pulsed, breathed, pushed, pulled with or without people; behaving ever so bodily. But no one cared about it anymore, they were too busy taking selfies with the river at TiberVita, for the “union with God”. There, the Pope watched as God’s silence became a product. He gave the final benediction in the form of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, then retired to a penthouse at the top of the TiberVita™ overlooking the river’s holy hush. Eventually the water resumed its natural rhythm all around the world. But no one noticed, for now faith has become a filter too strong and addictive to be put down otherwise. In front of everyone’s eyes, the Tiber, once worshipped for its impassivity, flowed freely again. Yet, the selfies and tourists were still flowing to worship its stillness, and nobody questioned it. And the cardinal’s, bishop’s and nun’s faith returned.

Now the water has returned back to normal, God has returned to their heart and disappeared from their eyes.